Entries associated with the tag "The Bourne Ultimatum":

Hey, glad you could make it! Let me take your coat. What are you drinking? Guinness? Well, how about Old Style? This is a free paper, you know.

Yeah, we realize the Oscars are hopelessly corrupt, but we needed an excuse for a party. We've all filled out ballots, and here's what we'd like to see win:

PAT GRAHAM  Best Picture: There Will Be Blood. Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages. Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages ("choice with a figurative gun to my head, though Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding's more to my liking"). Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises. Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There ("easiest of all the procrustean decisions here, with fewest reservations—though oddly enough I did have a couple on first viewing"). Best Animated Feature: Persepolis ("unfortunately"). Best Cinemathography: Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood ("though how much actually has to do with Elswit, since most of the important logistical choices—re where to position the camera and how scenes ought to reveal themselves through evolutionary long takes rather than editing-room montage—belong to the director rather than the cinematographer [or at least ought to], and seem open to debate"). Best Editing: Christopher Rouse, The Bourne Ultimatum (really brilliant, in a frenetic, hyperactive way that, unfortunately, makes for a movie badly in need of an anchor"). Best Costume Design: Albert Wolsky, Across the Universe ("just to get the movie in there somewhere...what do I know about costumes?").

ANDREA GRONVALL  Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. Best Director: Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Original Screenplay: Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton. Best Adapted Screenplay: Ronald Harwood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Actress: Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose. Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood. Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone. Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men. Best Foreign Language Film: Beaufort. Best Documentary Feature: Sicko. Best Animated Feature: Persepolis. Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Editing: Christopher Rouse, The Bourne Ultimatum. Best Art Direction: Dante Ferretti/Francesco Lo Sciavo, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Best Costume Design: Colleen Atwood, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Best Original Score: Dario Marianelli, Atonement.

J.R. JONES  Best Picture: Atonement. Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Screenplay: Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton. Best Adapted Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, Atonement. Best Actress: Julie Christie, Away From Her. Best Actor: George Clooney, Michael Clayton. Best Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone. Best Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight. Best Animated Feature: Persepolis. Best Cinematography: Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood. Best Editing: Juliette Welfling, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood/Katie Spencer, Atonement. Best Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran, Atonement. Best Original Score: Dario Marianelli, Atonement.

JOSHUA KATZMAN  Best Picture: There Will Be Blood. Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Screenplay: Brad Bird, Ratatouille. Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Actress: Julie Christie: Away From Her. Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood. Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone. Best Supporting Actor: Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild. Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight. Best Cinematography: Robert Elswit, There Will Be Blood. Best Editing: Jay Cassidy, Into the Wild. Best Art Direction: Jack Fisk/Jim Erickson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Score: Marco Beltrami, 3:10 to Yuma.

REECE PENDLETON  Best Picture: There Will Be Blood. Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Original Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, The Savages. Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul "I Drink Your Milkshake" Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Best Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages. Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood. Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone. Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War. Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight. Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran, Atonement. Best Original Score: "Sorry, but I just can't get past the fact that Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood wasn't eligible."

Still scrambling to catch up with the year-end releases—out of the reviewers' loop, I pay my own way, just like y'all—so my annual list of "favorite" movies (not "best," since what do I know about that?) will have to wait till later in the week. But favorite individual scenes/motifs from 2007? Now that's almost doable ...

Up a tree. In Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman's character gets stuck in an old red oak overlooking her family's Long Island seaside property. The symbolism's patent, the character's anxiety palpable—yet considerably more emerges from the physical world itself, in the comfortable pulpy textures of the trunk, the spread of the branches, the beckoning oceanic view: equal parts terror and transport, intimacy and infinity, with a radiant blue envelope of sky and water that seems to go on forever. Something like bliss on a crisp fall day, out on the scary subliminal edge of feeling—except you have to go beyond the literal script to find it. Also another peak moment in the foliage: the mist-shrouded finale of Sharon Lockhart's structuralist, meditative Pine Flat. Is there an actual tree in that billowing murk or only the ghost of same? With so much ambiguous hide-and-seek to puzzle over, it's almost impossible to know.

Passages to India. Benoit Jacquot's The Untouchable has been slagged for its allegedly too touristy, pittoresque scenes of subcontinental misery, and while there's obviously a point to rooting out cultural tin ears, in this case it seems almost completely misplaced. Why shouldn't The Untouchable be touristy? It's offering you a tourist's point of view, in the person of Isild Le Besco's Jeanne, as overawed as she is lost in the "exotic" Bengali undertow, the effects of raw immersion in a putatively "alien" world. I can't think of another film that captures the giddy push-pull of this so seductively, the conflicted urge to plunge ahead without a map, everything simultaneously disorienting and new. That Jacquot shoots it all with incidental "natives" staring into the camera simply adds to the strange confusion, the insinuating sense that our heroine's being constantly observed. For a while she seems even to attract her own stalker: same anonymous orange shirt bobbing in and out of frame; that this small ripple of tension ultimately dissipates doesn't negate the selective paranoia it induces. Runner-up along the Ganges: Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Scream of the Ants—more accusations of tourism, but to me it's an entropic descent, like a full cultural meltdown. Best not go there, just stay wherever you are ...

Trouble in the casbah. Don't you just love the way Julia Stiles's hair swings in one direction as the rest of her goes another during the big "woman in distress" chase sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum? Almost anonymous as she ping-pongs down assorted Tunisian alleyways and corridors, except every so often she'll turn to face the camera full—just so you know it's her, I guess. Almost pure formal abstraction in a film that would rather do away with actors and characters altogether—as well as, arguably, the most interesting thing about it.

Obviously there's more but unfortunately I haven't the time ... so why not fill in the blanks with some examples of your own? 

"I didn't know where I had come from. I didn't know where I was going—which are things you really need to know as an actor." —Matt Damon to Time magazine on his role in The Bourne Ultimatum

"Nobody goes to a movie because Matt Damon's in it," I argued with my life partner a short while back, who stubbornly insisted that exactly the opposite was true. This was only a day or so before Forbes.com announced that Damon was the most bankable star in Hollywood: $29 return per movie for every dollar he gets in base salary and perks. So what else do you think you know, smart guy?

Though actually I'm still not convinced. Maybe it's simply that Damon sells himself cheaper than most of the other monogram bankrolls, like Sandler and Depp and Cruise—or Brad Pitt, who wound up second on the Forbes.com list. So for every hypothetical $100 mill a movie takes in, Damon gets less than five while Cruise might claim up to ten. Which, to a certain extent, does seem to be the case—"a bargain" is how Forbes.com describes his contractual millions vis-a-vis the bigger-ticket stars. Well, that makes sense, Matt being a respectfully humble sort. Or more likely invisible, though "terminally recessive" seems a better description yet. Which apparently he's becoming more and more of with every film he makes . . . not his fault, mind you, since it all depends on how they use (or abuse) you and where they decide to set up the camera. Or if you're expected to act—make that run—with your back toward it through at least two-thirds of the production.

Still it's a kind of art—a presence in nonpresence, verging on giddy experiment—that in its own empty way seems pretty intriguing. I like the visual abstraction of The Bourne Ultimatum, aka Crank 2 with more sophisticated chops, and how Damon effectively disappears into it . . . not the role so much as the shape-shifting topography. Just another ambulating tourist in the perennial casbah of the mind—or maybe the new Chauncey Gardiner on anonymous undercover assignment. "Being there," done that—hell yeah, guy's zombie charged through it all!